The Hero (or Anti-Hero etc.) and the Big Bad stand at opposite ends of the street, hands hovering over their holsters. The camera cuts between their faces, their twitching fingers, the faces of the frightened crowd, and of the combatants framed by the opponent's legs. Long seconds pass. On a cue known only to the gunfighters, hands slap leather and shots ring out.

The outcome is never certain, and any number of Westerns, even in the pre-Post Modern days of the Fifties, played with this trope without subverting it. In Version A, will someone cheat? Will the combatants draw at ten paces, or turn it into Version B? In either version, will one get the drop on the other, but not fire? Will both draw, and reach a Mexican Standoff? Will one intentionally miss, shoot the gun out of the other's hand, or simply gun him down? Or will some third party change the dynamic completely?

Pokémon does this in the DP Galactic Battles episode Where No Togepi Has Gone Before. During the scene before Brock's Happiny and the evil Togepi fight, the background is a desert, and then, after a few seconds, the two Pokémon clash with one another.

B-ko and Gail face off in one in Project Ako Uncivil War with her utilizing a gun while he uses his magic.

Comic Books

The story "Low Moon" by Jason inexplicably switches out the traditional gunfight between the Sheriff and his black-hat-wearing nemesis Bill McGill with a game of chess.

A variant near the end of Serenity: Leaves on the Wind. The crew drops the Operative off on a planet, and Zoe follows him into the woods and throws him a pistol, telling him that despite him helping save her, he still killed her husband and that debt can't be repaid. The scene ends with them standing under the trees waiting to draw. Next panel Zoe comes back to the ship, but it's not stated whether she killed the Operative.

One gag has multiple pairs of people waiting in line for their shootouts. That is, lined up behind each other. On all four branches of a crossroads.

The Tenderfoot has one at the climax, but the titular tenderfoot, an Imperturbable Pom, uses the ten-steps-and-turn-method, which completely destabilizes the villain, even moreso when his shot appears to go wild. On seeing the Englishman yet to fire, the villain begs for mercy, after which the Englishman reveals he'd been hit in the arm, and the pain was simply unbearable.

One story had an I Just Wanna Be Badass guy ask Luke for help impressing his fiancee by winning a gunfight. Unfortunately, his aim is so bad Luke has to duck despite standing behind him. In the end he challenges Luke, both men are replaced by his Love Interest / a saloon girl respectively, he kills a criminal completely by accident, and this reputation is enough to keep desperadoes out of town ever after.

One strip mentions that before its replacement by its sharper cousin, duels in the West involved fighting with Bowie... spoons.

One duel has one guy yelling out words that rhyme with "Draw!" to check the other guy's hearing.

One duel has the loser claim he was certain the turnaround was supposed to be after eleven steps.

Hitman has Tommy go up against a telepathic gunslinger who can and will outdraw anyone due to reading their minds. The Big Bad mockingly asks how Tommy's going to beat that, Nat obligingly provides the answer: have your buddy blow his head off while he's not looking.

Film

High Noon, despite what one would think, actively subverts this, as the hero sneaks up behind the gang of villains, gun already drawn, and yells for them to drop their guns before shooting one in the neck and leading to a tense chase. Furthermore, noon only marks the arrival of Frank Miller and co., not the showdown itself.

Back to the Future Part III. Marty asks Buford if he wants their showdown to happen at high noon, but Buford insists that he "does [his] killing before breakfast." Ultimately, the film provides a Double Subversion of the trope when Marty refuses to take his place in the duel, but is forced to anyway. However, he still refuses to actually shoot Buford, relying instead on a Bulletproof Vest ploy. (Maybe that makes it a TripleSubversion.)

It also features a subversion in the opening moments of the film. Three men dismount on opposite ends of a dead silent little town, two of them traveling together. They walk ominously towards each other, eventually stopping almost within arms' reach in front of a saloon. They reach for their guns, draw... and all three rush into the saloon and start shooting at Tuco, aka the Ugly.

Once Upon a Time in the West has variety B between the hero, supporting his noose-hanging brother with his shoulders. The eerie harmonica music accompanied by this scene overlapping with the showdown is the harmonica being pushed into the hero's mouth at the time of the execution. It comes together perfectly as the hero guns the bad guy down.

Most films about the gunfight at the OK Corral usually turn this bloody ambush into a Showdown at High Noon.

Howard the Duck had one of those, complete with cuts between the faces and bad guy throwing the side of his Badass Longcoat back to reach for his gun more easily... Except that there was no gun - the bad guy was an interdimensional demon inhabiting the body of an innocent scientist, versus an anthropomorphic duck armed with a BFG strapped to a golf-cart.

The Matrix, in the subway station. It even had newspaper tumbleweed. Of course, given the fact that both combatants could dodge bullets like crazy, it quickly turned into a kung fu showdown rather than a gunfight.

The endings of the western spoofs Support Your Local Sheriff and Support Your Local Gunfighter are both extended parodies of this trope. The first film also has the eponymous sheriff dealing with a series of hired guns who all confront him in this fashion: "Why do these jaspers always hit town at mealtime?"

The Guns of Navarone. While in a firefight in some ruins, Spyros Pappadimos and a German officer find themselves facing off, each armed with a machine gun. They advance slowly toward each other and eventually start firing. Both are killed in the gun battle.

The film Posse had a scene where the two combatants advanced slowly, attacking with Throw-Away Guns.

Three O'Clock High transports the trope into a high school, replacing the gunfight with a fistfight scheduled for after school at 3:00. The name of the film is a riff on "high noon" and "high school."

Inverted in BloodRayne II: Deliverance. The vampires controlling the town tell Rayne, "You've got until High Midnight to get out of town."

Subverted all to hell in an early scene of Wyatt Earp. The first gunfight of the film is between two angry drunks, staggering around about ten feet from each other and firing wildly. Both men shoot each other at about the same time, and we (and young Wyatt) are treated to the sight of one of them bleeding out from a shot to the crotch while a horse that caught a stray bullet screams in pain until it's put down.

The New Old West movie Extreme Prejudice (1987) culminates with a pre-arranged shootout over the Love Interest by her suitors, Texas Ranger Jack Benteen and his childhood friend turned drug kingpin Cash Bailey.

Plumber: High Noon? Why high noon? The Judge: I know. I told them it's overused as well.

The climatic showdown between Guerrero and Red in Dead in Tombstone takes place at midnight rather than high noon, but otherwise follows the trope.

In Bad Day at Black Rock, the showdown between the protagonist and the antagonist is set to take place at midnight. However, their actual confrontation takes place out of town thanks to a bit of subterfuge.

In Johannes Cabal the Detective Cabal and the books Big Bad, Count Marechal face-off with handguns-tension building as Marechal lets Cabal give The Summation about how he solved the murders aboard the airhsip. They then each take a single shot at each other, showing why its not about how fast you can aim but rather how well you can aim.

In the Han Solo novel Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, Han faces down legendary Gunslinger Gallandro. The two of them had been working together until Gallandro decides it's time for a showdown. Gallandro wins the quick draw and wounds Han, but the shooting activates a no-weapons system and Gallandro gets vaporized by lasers.

The final duel between Harry Potter and Voldemort ends up one of these (a Type B), except both wizards fire at the exact moment the sun rises. Additionally, Voldemort lost long before the duel ever actually began.

Subverted in Wayne and Shuster's Fist Full of Dollars sketch where, after the climactic gunfight in which dozens of bullets are fired at Schuster with no effect, he reveals that he was using the old "brick wall under the poncho" trick.

Happens in Psych, between a policeman and... a cowboy (not a real cowboy - this is the one at those little re-enactment tourist traps), after it's uncovered he's been whacking people to try and keep a gold cache under the town secret. The cowboy's SAA, however, was real. Cop wins.

In Doctor Who, The Eleventh Doctor gets into one of these. A Time Lord and a Cyborg. This was in the episode "A Town Called Mercy".

A version of this starts off Justified. US Marshal Raylan Givens has given a murderous thug 24 hours to leave Miami. As the deadline is about to pass, the two men meet at a terrace restaurant on a sunny Florida day. They sit opposite each other at a table and Raylan gives the thug one last chance to leave town. The thug draws his gun and Raylan kills him. The extremely public nature of the shootout (and rumors about the 24 hour deadline) causes a massive PR headache for the Marshal Service and while the shooting is deemed "justified", Raylan is reassigned to the Lexington, Kentucky office.

In The Adventures of Superboy episode "Threesome, Part 2," Superboy has one of these with Luthor, Metallo, & Odessa Vexman on a deserted street in Smallville. The scene comes complete with a Western-style musical score. This one is most like version B.

Parodied in a Russ Abbot sketch; a grim gunslinger arrives in the bar at five minutes to noon, terrifying the locals. When the clock strikes twelve, a second horse is heard outside, and in walks the gunslinger's mother, to drag him home for his dinner.

Mission: Impossible: "Gunslinger" ends with Jim Phelps holding showdowns with The Dragon and then the Big Bad. To capture them alive, Jim's gun was loaded with tranquillizer bullets. And to make sure Jim won, the dragon's drink was drugged.

In Legends of Tomorrow episode "The Magnificent Eight", Rip has one of these with outlaw Jeb Stillwater almost at the end.

Music

The Mega Man remix-band The Megas make the battle between Megaman and Quickman sound like an embodiment of this trope. It's all built up with Quickman as the "sheriff"; with lines such as "Quick on the draw, in this town I am the law. Is what they say true? Does death wear blue? Can he fall?" The conclusion comes with "My circuits slow. I'm not scared anymore. Reach for my weapon and in turn you're reaching for yours. My circuits slow. What they said is a lie. The shots are heard and the bullets scream death as they fly", essentially also making this an example of a Single-Stroke Battle. In the end, the winner is Megaman. But what did you expect? He's the hero.

Panther of The Protomen made such a song to promote the member Turbo Lover's band Cheer Up, Charlie Daniels, about the band competing with a similarly-named group for rights to the band name. The song was called The Duel. The song's also getting a sequel, The Duel: Part 2, about the band's showdown at The Road to Bonnaroo.

The Marty Robbins' song Big Iron is this trope in spirit, when the Arizona Ranger and Texas Red have their showdown.

The morning passed so quickly it was time for them to meet,

It was twenty past eleven when they walked out in the street.

Allan Sherman's 1962 parody of the Streets of Laredo, called the Streets of Miami, feature two business partners shooting it out "in the heat of the sun at the stroke of high noon."

"Sam crumbled, just like a piece halvah."

Newspaper Comics

When Calvin and Hobbes parody this, the urban expansion solution actually does occur to them.

Hobbes: I get to be the zoning board!

His mom didn't let them play with guns.

The New Yorker in the 1960s parodied this trope in a cartoon showing a samurai movie in which two samurai with swords drawn are facing each other prepared for this sort of showdown with the subtitle "Kyushu isn't big enough for the both of us!"

Pinball

The Wizard Mode of Cactus Canyon is "High Noon at the OK Corral", requiring the player to hit twenty Bad Guys in around 30 seconds.

Deadlands featured a full set of rules—in the core rulebook, no less—for conducting such a duel, including justification for the "cue known only to the gunfighters" bit: drawing second made things pardonable in the eyes of the law, so the lead-in to a proper duel consisted of head games intended to make one's adversary draw first, with bonuses given to the rolls of players who can come up with truly terrifying intimidations or biting ridicules to put in the mouths of their characters.

In Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, you (and the enemy) can now strafe left and right around each other. Dueling revolves around keeping the enemy in the center of the screen at all times, since the cue to fire can come at any time (with a bell sound). At the same time, the player has to use the mouse/right stick to keep their character's hand close to his gun (but not too close or the hand position will be reset!) to reduce the drawing time. Once the bell sounds, the player must reach for the gun and shoot the enemy as the aiming reticule slides from the ground up.

In Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, you can no longer move but instead use the WASD keys/left stick to control how close Silas' hand is to the gun (which reduces the drawing time), while the mouse/right stick is used to keep the aiming reticule on the enemy (who can move and throw off your aim) in order to generally slow down time when the duel starts. When it does (usually after a preset time), you can use WASD/left stick to dodge bullets while drawing the gun and firing. Once again, there is a Dual Boss mid-game, and the Final Boss is a three-way shootout with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The ancient ZX Spectrum western-themed adventure The Wild Bunch used version B if you decided you wanted to kill the bad guys, rather than just bring them in to the sheriff (killing them was more rewarding). The trick was that you had to let the bad guy move first, so that's it's self-defence to shoot him rather than just plain old murder.

Billy Frontier has an unusual spin on this where rather than simply being the first to draw after a signal, you also have to play a LITERAL Simon Says Minigame during the “glare at each other sullenly” stage.

Also happens frequently in Red Dead Redemption as a random event, in some parts of the story, and if Marston is caught cheating at pokernote This results in an easy way to farm honor: if you shoot the gun out of your opponent's hand, you get honor points, in addition to the fame you would get for just winning the duel. Then you can go back to the poker table, get caught cheating again, and repeat as necessary.

Live A Live has one of the A variety in its Wild West chapter. The protagonist and his nemesis each take five steps (on account of the small viewing area), draw and shoot... at two different outlaws hiding on the sidelines.

Parodied in Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal: After Guybrush has rearranged the mysterious wind idol near the Vaycaylian Wind Control Device, De Singe arrives with a rifle and demands that Guybrush surrender his Poxed hand. A brief period of staring silence follows, complete with close-ups of both Guybrush's and De Singe's faces in a style parody of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly before the former breaks the silence with "Make me!" and the latter pulls out the rifle and shoots him sky-high. Of course, Guybrush is still alive when he lands on the ground and gets up.

Tin Star has one of these at the end of every day (with one exception), and they serve as the game's boss battles. They're always comical too; if you miss one of the shots, you may kill a passing bird or even shoot down the belts from your opponent, causing his pants to fall down.

Happens twice in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, with the same Western-loving character. The first time, you're in a typical shootout with him, but you can choose to stand out in the middle of the battlefield, which will cause him to engage in a quickdraw fight with you. The second time is right at the end of the game, where he challenges you to another quickdraw shootout, with the added excitement of not knowing which of the guns have a bullet in them. In a subversion, the bullet is blank no matter what happens.

In Borderlands 2, the final mission involving the Sheriff of Lynchwood has her challenging you to a duel. Subverted in the fact that her idea of a "duel" involves being surrounded by a posse of mooks and taking potshots at you from the rooftops behind cover. Nonetheless, she uses a pistol as her primary weapon and one of the bonus objectives is to defeat her with a pistol.

There's one in a cutscene of Star Trek Online, of all places. Episode "Wasteland", mission "A Fistful of Gorn" starts with your contact on Nimbus III, an old Romulan named Law, challenging a Gorn pirate who's gunning for your head and attempting to fill the power vacuum you created in the previous mission. He leaves you a death note and they square off in a version B. Battle Discretion Shot as they fire. Next scene has Law walk up to you and give a nonchalant shrug, then note that he looks a little stupid for giving you a death note and then surviving.

Overwatch has the character McCree, an Expy of the Man With No Name. When using his ultimate Deadeye ability, McCree will drawl "It's high noon ..." and fire a kill shot at each target in view once the attack charges. There's even a tumbleweed. McCree will always say "It's high noon" even on maps where it's clearly twilight or night time, leading to Memetic Mutation that he has a very bad perception of time.The writers realized this, and later gave him the voice line "Well, it's high noon somewhere in the world."

Parodied in thisxkcd. A showdown occurs between two cowboys at noon, a tumbleweed rolls by... then the tumbleweed pulls out dual revolvers and guns both the cowboys down.

Western Animation

Avatar: The Last Airbender: A portion of Prince Zuko's A Day in the Limelight is a blatant pastiche of the Western showdown — in a world resembling mid-nineteenth century China, so not as far from the Wild West as one might think. The very next episode goes as far to feature a ghost town, a Mexican Standoff, and a three-way showdown that once more takes place at high noon.

Spoofed in the Looney Tunes cartoon "Drip Along Daffy": Daffy and Nasty Canasta do version A, but before a single shot is fired, Porky defeats Canasta with a wind-up toy soldier... with a ridiculously powerful musket. The crowd already has Porky up on their shoulders when Daffy, still walking towards the showdown, realizes what happened.

Featured in a SpongeBob SquarePants Western-themed episode, where SpongeBob's look-alike ancestor SpongeBuck has a showdown with outlaw Dead Eye Plankon. It ends before it even begins, when SpongeBuck accidentally steps on Dead Eye.

An American Tail: Fievel Goes West had one, though it was at sunset and not at noon.

One episode of The Simpsons featured Homer slapping people everywhere he went challenging them to duels to avoid having to pay for things. Unfortunately when he challenges an old fashioned Texas cowboy to a duel, the man naturally accepted. At the end of the episode they finally duel with the customary ten steps when the Texan is distracted by a pie Marge cooked. Homer, in a move that was idiotic even for him, reminded the man that the duel was not over. The Texan apologized for his rudeness and promptly shot Homer in the shoulder.

Teen Titans: The year: Present Day. The place: a forest in TV-land. The time: right now. A water ski and life jacket-wearing Robin squares off with the Off-World Outlaw. On the sidelines a grizzly and a Steve IrwinExpy hold their breath in rapt attention. The trope collapses like a starcruiser from Reverse Polarity-induced temporal feedback when Robin socks his opponent in the face while he's distracted by the cheering bear.

Played nasty and played straight in Galaxy Rangers episode "Galaxy Stranger" where Shane and Singray “settle things” on the main street of Frontier. The show was a Space Western, and the writers played it for all it was worth.

The Backyardigans, being the kid-friendly show it is, played this relatively straight, replacing the shootout with a ping-pong match.

In the ReBoot episode 'The Episode With No Name' Andraia and a nameless female Guardian have a showdown in the streets. Slightly modified since Andraia uses projectile spikes, instead of a gun. She still wins.

An episode of Rugrats plays with this with 'Showdown at Teeter-Totter Gulch' in which Tommy and Chuckie deal with a bully named "The Junk Food Kid", who always comes to the park at noon, or "No Shadow Time." Their first encounter ends badly, but Tommy prevails the second time.

Ironically, in matter of historical fact gun duels have been more common among upper-class "gentlemen" who put great value on personal honor, rather than the lower-class characters who dominate Westerns. Perhaps the most famous example of such a duel is the 1804 duel in which American Vice President Aaron Burr killed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The difference here is that dueling pistols were not at all accurate nor meant to be accurate — the point of the duel was to prove you cared enough about the grievance to risk your life. That Aaron Burr actually hit and killed Hamilton was a freak occurrence.

According to the book Founding Brothers, the two witnesses they had brought along agreed in writing that Hamilton fired first and missed, then Burr fired two or three seconds later, fatally wounding Hamilton. Whether Hamilton missed deliberately or Burr intended to miss but hit by accident is a matter for speculation.

Also, the showdowns happened at high noon (yes, they really did) so that neither participant would have more of the sun in their eyes than the other, and it'd be a fair draw.

In an episode covering duelling, the documentary series "Tales of the Gun" indicated that high quality duelling pistols were in fact made to be extremely accurate (or at least as accurate as unrifled flintlocks and percussion cap pistols could be).

The important thing about dueling pistols was not that they were inaccurate on purpose, but that they were always from the same dueling set, and were never zeroed (meaning fired from before to determine where exactly bullets are going relative to the visible sight line). To zero a dueling pistol, as was said, would be murder. The pairs were provided by one of the nobles (these were generally very finely made and expensive), and loaded by a third party (dueling aides). Actual, pre-sighted military handguns (such as army Tula pistols in case of Russian officers) were used only in extreme circumstances.

The "honor" component changed the playing field somewhat from how western "quick draw" shootouts are usually depicted. Andrew Jackson once fought a duel in which he deliberately allowed his opponent to fire first, so that if he missed, he would be compelled by honor to remain still and allow Jackson (taking more time to aim properly) to return fire. Jackson was hit in the chest, but non-fatally, and his return shot killed his opponent. This was considered a dirty trick, though.

Generally, duelists could purposefully raise or lower the chances of hitting, depending on their intentions, the gravity of the insult, personal beliefs and other factors. "Rules of engagement" varied from long distance, about 20 yards (very low chance of injury); to fire-at-will while closing (a gamble between getting the first shot and missing, or waiting and shooting from the "barrier" at 10 yards); to the extreme, suicidal "handhold" duel with participants holding the same handkerchief with off-hands. Another rule said that a duelist must fire when the barrier is reached; that after mutual misses, additional shots should be taken; and also that an intentional miss is honorable only after weathering a miss (or even a hit) from the opponent. The choice of aiming point was also a matter of intentions: non-lethal wounds were common - although not guaranteed, because of the inherent inaccuracy of dueling sets. At certain points (before the duel, after mutual shots) the parties could, through their aides, reach a peaceful resolution - a duel's main goal was to resolve a conflict in an honorable manner.

James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok gunned down a man by the name of Davis Tutt in 1865 in Springfield, Missouri, in a rare example of a bona fide Wild West "quickdraw" showdown. After winning about $200 in a poker game against Tutt's compatriots—who were playing with Tutt's money—Tutt alleged that Hickok owed him $35 from a previous game; Hickok claimed the debt was only $25. Tutt seized Hickok's prized golden pocket watch as collateral. Humiliated but outnumbered, Hickok warned Tutt not to wear the watch in public. Tutt brazenly assured Hickok that he would be wearing it first thing in the morning. Hickok then calmly told Tutt that he would shoot him if he saw him wearing the watch, then pocketed his winnings and left. True to his promise, Tutt openly wore the watch in the town square the following day. Word quickly reached Hickok's ears and, after a final round of negotiations failed to settle the debt, Hickok walked into the square just before 6 p.m., pistol drawn, sending everyone except Tutt running for cover. Wild Bill cocked his pistol, holstered it and called out to Tutt, "Don't you come across here with that watch." Tutt said nothing, but stood with his hand on his pistol. At a distance of about 75 yards, both men "stared down" the other for a brief moment. Tutt drew first, Hickok raising his Colt Navy in response. Each man fired one shot at almost exactly the same moment. Tutt missed. Hickok was luckier: his shot struck Tutt in his left side between his fifth and seventh ribs. Hickok was charged with manslaughter. However, in his trial, the judge informed the jury that, while Wild Bill was technically guilty of the crime he was charged with, they may decide to apply the "unwritten" law of a "fair fight." The jury took no more than a couple of hours to bring back a not guilty verdict.

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